Picture the Psalmist looking up at the night sky and composing “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1). To whom—in our scientific age—do the heavens declare the glory of God? What would it take today for mankind to see in the heavens the same thing the Psalmist saw? The heavens declare that God is, that He is glorious, and that the starry skies are His handiwork.

The Fine-tuning Problem: Creation

Until the 20th century, the belief that God created the universe could be dismissed as a holdover from a time of ignorance or, at best, the conclusions of medieval philosophy. But now the verdict is in. The whole setup for the universe (and for the observer) to exist requires contrivance at every level. As the British atheist astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle put it (after looking at the precise way the nucleus of a carbon atom had to vibrate to make the rest of the elements that make up our universe): “A superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”

Since then, we can fill in more details, all of which point to a designed universe. This is known as the fine-tuning problem.

So how do we advance the argument from “Gee, that seems amazing” to a more structured argument that can stand up to scrutiny? Enter the Intelligent Design movement (ca. 1991). The basic claim is that some things in nature are best explained by the actions of an intelligent agent. Stated as a deductive argument: The fine-tuning of the universe is due to one of three things: 1) chance; 2) some physical necessity that had to be there; or 3) design. The possibility that all forces of nature and initial conditions of the universe are so unlikely that it is hard to find any scientist who believes that we are just this lucky. Despite secularism’s preferences and methods, a design agent seems a much more likely explanation for what we now see, given the complexity and precision it takes to put together a universe, that from its inception must have—and did have—the capacity to put together something as fine-tuned as we see. So, of the three possibilities, only “design” is left standing. As one atheist put it, “This is the one argument for God that keeps me up at night.”

Origin of Life

Next, regarding the origin of life, Darwin supposed it came about in “some warm little pond,” but he lacked the tools to show how. By the mid-1950s, we had some ideas about the chemical composition of the early Earth. We also know now that some meteorites contain the building blocks of life, such as amino acids that form proteins and sugars that form the backbone of DNA. This inspired the famous Miller-Urey experiment that most basic biology textbooks proudly display as the answer to the origin of life. The team cooked up the basic ingredients: ammonia, carbon dioxide, and water—and, voila! They got a mixture of amino acids that might form chains, i.e., peptides and proteins. It was assumed that the rest of the stairway from chemistry to biology would be forthcoming.

Fast forward to today, and despite an explosion in the details, the problem has just gotten harder. Twelve distinct problems must be solved in order. Starting at the bottom, the formation and concentration of the building blocks. Unlike the Miller experiment, which produced some of the required building blocks but also many contaminants (road tar), the products must be pure before they can be used in the next step. The nature of chemical reactions is that, as you form the necessary building blocks, you get cross-reactions that produce lots of unnecessary ones that gum up the works. Skilled chemists can make the separations, but nature can’t. A common mistake among science popularizers is that given enough time, some useful building blocks link up to make something useful for life. But at temperatures relevant to living systems, these reactions reach an equilibrium; i.e., the desired products break down into the starting materials. This means that time is not your friend.

Another problem is that the reactions that link the amino acid building blocks require the removal of a water molecule for each addition. If the water is not removed, the reaction will stop. The irony is that while water is necessary for life, it must also be removed. This is an example of the many chicken-and-egg problems that must be solved. Another is a source of energy, such as heat or electricity, to kick-start the reaction—yet the same energy breaks down the desired product. So much for the excitement when a planet is proposed as a candidate for life because it might have surface water!

Yet another problem is called homochirality, which is just a word for handedness—like right-hand and left-hand gloves. Only one “hand” type is compatible with life, yet chemistry produces right- and left-handed molecules in equal numbers. Even skilled chemists can’t make the separations without using the very molecules derived from life.

Moving further up the staircase from chemistry to biology, we encounter the sequence problem. Assuming you have all 22 amino acids in pure form with all the right “hands,” they must be linked in the right order to have biological function. It has been experimentally determined that, for a modest-sized protein, the ratio of working to non-working protein chains is 1 part in 10 to the 77th power. It’s like picking out one atom in the entire galaxy! Time and chance are not an explanation. Sir Francis Crick of DNA fame called this the sequence problem and said, “It’s like a miracle, but of course those don’t happen.” He is an example of how someone’s prior philosophical and religious commitments can prevent them from viewing science objectively.

We have now shown that a working, life-permitting universe must be fine-tuned, and the origin of life would require a multi-step lab with skilled chemists at each of the twelve steps, and even then, there are problems we can’t solve—like knowing which sequences yield functional proteins without running the experiments an astronomical number of times. (But who knows, perhaps AI can help. This should hint at Fred Hoyle’s “superintellect.”)

Evolution

But what about the evolution of life? Didn’t Darwin show that once you did get to the first “simple” life with all its variations, nature would select for reproductive fitness in each environment? His famous “Tree of Life” would branch out until a sentient being would come about and “discover” evolution. This would proceed with small steps, gradually building until a new species comes about. He said if the small variations weren’t there, his theory would “absolutely fall apart.” Creationists have been criticized for using the analogy of a tornado in a junkyard producing a 747, as if the whole process occurred at once, ignoring Darwinian gradualism. “New Atheist” Richard Dawkins wrote a book on this called Climbing Mount Improbable. He said the creationists were climbing the sheer face while evolutionists went around the sloping backside and took the stairs. So, let’s take a look at the staircase and ask how big the steps are. It turns out they are pretty big! Using the old rule of thumb that one gene is needed for each protein (not really true anymore, but still a useful illustration), and let’s call a gene a thousand letters using the four-letter DNA alphabet. That’s a big sequence problem. Applying this to a well-known icon of Intelligent Design theory, the bacterial flagellum (which is literally an electric outboard motor made up of 40 proteins), you would need to solve the thousand-letter sequence problem 40 times! I will spare you the math. The steps are huge and beyond the reach of chance. Another bottleneck to evolution is gene regulatory networks. To change the body plan of an organism, you have to act early—when the sperm meets the egg—or in the first few cell divisions before the cells start to differentiate into tissue types because DNA has to be the same in each cell.

A basic problem for new body plans is gene regulatory networks. They are represented by diagrams resembling circuit boards. Try making a random change in a real circuit board and see what happens. It’s been tried, and in every case, you crash the organism.

These are two evolution killers at the most basic level. But don’t we see evolution happening right now? Sort of. But what you are seeing is adaptation after the body plan has been established. For example, some fish lose their eyesight in dark caves. Why spend effort supporting eyes you don’t need? They grow back in the light. The environment is signaling whether genes that already exist should be expressed or repressed. Nothing new is being made. This is an adaptation. It’s designed into the system as a type of self-engineering and should not be mistaken for producing novelty.

Intelligent Design (ID) has been effective in its critique of materialistic explanations for the apparent design in nature, but does it really point to God? ID proponents claim that their theory is scientific and not religious. Despite this, ID is accused of religious motivation, but this cuts both ways. Most evolutionary biologists are atheists or agnostics, so should we dismiss their arguments? No! Both sides need to be looked at on their merits.

Another objection is the so-called “God of the gaps”—that just because science doesn’t have a materialist explanation today, believers in scientific progress say we must wait. But all the progress since the Miller experiment has gone in the direction of design. ID is not just a negative argument against materialism but follows the scientific principle of uniformitarianism, an appeal to causes now known to be in operation. When we see messages in code that convey information and perform a function, our uniform experience is that they are the product of a mind. Francis Crick recognized this with his sequence problem and proposed that aliens designed it. But this raises the question of who made the aliens? Perhaps some godlike spirit inside the universe, or perhaps the universe itself, did the designing. This fits with the New Age and some Eastern religions. But this would not be God in the ultimate sense.

Furthermore, the life-permitting design of the universe requires a personal transcendent Being outside the universe. Why should the impersonal universe want to have purpose? Sadly, some of the biggest opponents of ID are in the Christian community! This sometimes comes under the heading of “theistic evolution.” That sounds good and creates the image of God guiding the process. On the surface, there is no theological objection, but if you ask them to unpack what they mean, most will tell you that God used the Darwinian mechanism or one of its later iterations, so you are really back to a purposeless process. Or, to put it another way, not even an all-powerful God can use a purposeless process for a purpose. Some don’t like the idea of an interventionist God who has to “tinker” with His creation when a more elegant solution is a God who wound up the universe and let it run on its own. But this is more like Enlightenment deism rather than the active God of the Bible. A better understanding of evolution would be helpful in evangelizing. I don’t think this is needed in every case, but studies have shown that evolution is a barrier to many and a cause for deconstruction of faith among the young.

Conclusion

So, we have three lines of evidence that all point to the same thing. In the case of the universe, we have the idea of a control room with all the dials set to the exact specification for a life-permitting universe. In the origin of life, we can picture a vast laboratory with pure ingredients delivered at each step, and while each process may be natural, the whole setup must be specified. The third leg of this argument, the evolution of life, must be specified at the molecular level to produce a functional whole, as anything non-functional tends to be lost or selected against. When three separate lines of evidence all point to the same thing, you have a strong case—“two or three witnesses.” More lines of evidence could be developed, like the uniqueness of our sun and solar system. More engineering analogies are being developed in areas such as hierarchical systems with feedback loops, which engineers readily recognize as the work of an agent.

But can we name the agent? I came to faith in Christ by looking at the prophecies about the Messiah in the Old Testament. Starting with the “seed of woman” in Genesis 3:15, down through the genealogies, the identity of the Messiah is being narrowed down, including the location of birth (Micah 5:2), the time of his arrival (Daniel 9:24), the manner and purpose of His death (Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53), His resurrection body (Psalm 16:10), and many others.

The prophets who wrote these under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit did not understand what all the pieces meant. “They wondered what the Spirit of Christ within them was talking about” (1 Peter 10:12, TLB). Putting it in design terms, they had the specification (the Old Testament prophecies), but they had not recognized the pattern until all the pieces were in place (the New Testament fulfillment). The Bible has the same specification and fulfillments found in nature—not surprising, as both are a product of the same Mind!

So, yes, we can name the designer, and His name is Jesus. All things were made in Him, through Him, from Him, for Him, and by Him (John 1:3, Romans 11:36, and Colossians 1:16).

The Psalmist wasn’t wrong after all!

Paul Ernst taught high school chemistry and physics in the 1970s. He was an atheist at the time. After coming to faith in 2001, based on the historical case for the resurrection of Jesus Christ, he decided to use his background to help secular people overcome objections, especially from science. Paul has authored a Christian apologetics book entitled You Bet Your Life: A Toolbox for Making Life’s Ultimate Decision. He follows the Discovery Institute’s work to keep up with the latest developments in Intelligent Design.